“Computational photography refers broadly to sensing strategies and algorithmic
techniques that extend the capabilities of digital photography. Representative
techniques include high dynamic range imaging, flash-noflash imaging, coded
aperture and coded exposure imaging, panoramic stitching, all-focus imaging,
and plenoptic imaging. Computational videography extends these ideas to moving
pictures, as well as introducing additional techniques such as stabilization
and spatio-temporal super-resolution.
In this talk, I will briefly survey the state-of-the-art in computational
photography and videography, and I will describe my laboratory’s project to
build an open-source camera platform. Our current prototype, called the
Frankencamera, accommodates SLR lenses and SLR-quality sensors, runs Linux, is
programmable at the microsecond time scale, and is connected to the Internet.
I will end by describing several ongoing research projects: (1) high-speed
burst mode photography – in the future, all still cameras should capture
imagery at 500 fps, (2) focal sweep cameras coupled with focal stack
compositing, (3) a domain-specific language (DSL) for photographic image
processing and low-level computer vision, and (4) new sensor architectures for
computational photography, including CMOS imagers having multi-bucket pixels.”
Biographical sketch:
Marc Levoy is the VMware Founders Professor of Computer Science at
Stanford University, with a joint appointment in the Department of
Electrical Engineering. He received degrees in Architecture from
Cornell University in 1976 and 1978 and a PhD in Computer Science from
the University of North Carolina in 1989. In previous lives he worked
on computer-assisted cartoon animation (1970s), volume rendering
(1980s), and 3D scanning (1990s). His current interests include light
field sensing and display, computational photography, and computational
microscopy. At Stanford he teaches computer graphics, photography, and
the science of art. Outside of academia, Levoy co-designed the Google
book scanner, launched Google’s Street View project, and currently
works on Google’s Project Glass. He is a NSF Presidential Young
Investigator, 1996 winner of the SIGGRAPH Achievement award, and a
fellow of the ACM.